The Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index tells an uncomfortable story about a continent that considers press freedom one of its foundational values. While the top tier — Norway, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands — consistently ranks among the freest press environments in the world, the EU contains member states that rank in the 60s, 70s and even below 100 globally, alongside authoritarian states with no democratic pretensions. The divergence within the EU is significant, has been growing for over a decade, and intersects directly with the broader rule-of-law challenges that Hungary and others have posed to European democratic norms.
The researchers who track it
Dr. Marius Dragomir, director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University in Vienna, has spent two decades documenting press freedom trends across post-communist Europe. His assessment of the current moment is measured but serious.
“What we’re seeing is not primarily overt censorship — governments shutting newspapers or jailing journalists, though that happens too,” he explains. “The dominant mechanism is media ownership concentration combined with advertising market manipulation. A government-friendly oligarch buys a newspaper or television station. The editorial line changes. Journalists who resist leave or are pushed out. Formal press freedom — no censorship, no arrests — is maintained. Substantive press freedom — the ability to hold power to account without professional or financial consequences — is eroded.”
Hungary: the template others follow
Hungary’s media landscape has transformed most completely under Viktor Orbán’s government. Between 2010 and 2025, over 500 media outlets came under the ownership of individuals or foundations aligned with the government. The Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA), established in 2018, consolidated hundreds of regional newspapers, news websites, magazines and radio stations under a single entity in what the Commission found to be a state-aid-financed acquisition that eliminated most of the regional press as an independent voice. Hungary now ranks below 80th on global press freedom indices — lower than several non-EU European countries.
“Hungary is the extreme case, but the model has been studied and partially replicated,” Dragomir notes. “In Slovakia, Serbia, and parts of Poland during the PiS period, we saw similar dynamics — ownership changes, public broadcaster politicisation, advertising market manipulation — used to reduce the plurality of voices available to citizens without the need for overtly authoritarian measures.”
The EU’s tools — and their limits
The EU’s Media Freedom Act, adopted in 2024, creates new obligations around media ownership transparency, protections for editorial independence, and safeguards against state advertising being used to favour politically compliant outlets. It is the EU’s most significant legislative intervention in media policy and reflects a recognition that press freedom is an EU competence issue, not only a national one. Enforcement, however, remains primarily national — and in the countries where press freedom is most under pressure, national enforcement capacity and will are the weakest links in the chain.
The Commission’s Article 7 procedure against Hungary, the infringement proceedings on media ownership, the rule-of-law conditionality on EU funds — all of these create pressure but have not reversed the deterioration. As our governance analysis noted, the EU’s enforcement architecture was designed for accidental non-compliance, not systematic dismantling of democratic institutions by governments that understand the rules and are deliberately working around them.
